Was the Diplomat of the 13th Dalai Lama a Russian Spy?

Ngawang Dorje, also known as Agvan Dorjiev, is a Buryat Mongolian, a
“Geshe Lharampa” Lama from Drepung Monastery; he used to be a Minister
of the Kashag and acted as a diplomat under the 13th Dalai Lama.

High Peaks Pure Earth has translated a blogpost by Woeser written in
August 2014 for the Mandarin service of Radio Free Asia and published on her blog on August 19, 2014.

This post looks at the fascinating historical figure of Buryat Lama Ngawang Dorje, also known as Agvan Dorjiev.

Was the Diplomat of the 13th Dalai Lama A “Russian Spy”?
By Woeser

The book given to me by the Tibetologist from Buryatia

Not long ago, I was fortunate to get to know a few Tibetologists from
Buryatia (Russia) who were all of Mongolian ethnicity; they were
researching Tibetan history, Tibetan medicine, traditional Tibetan
Buddhism and Tibetan language. I admired them for their ability to not
only speak Buryat Mongolian and Russian, but also English, Tibetan, and
Chinese.

During our conversation, I learnt that Moscow also has a University
like the “Minzu Universities” in Beijing, Chengdu, Lanzhou and so on;
their Russian equivalent could be translated into “Ethnic Friendship
University”. The youngest of the scholars said jokingly that it was only
after he had entered this “Ethnic Friendship University” that he
realised the existence of various non-friendly ethnic sentiments. Even
though Buryatia is called an “Autonomous Republic”, it is said to be
very similar to the Tibet Autonomous Region (but of course the Buryatia
Autonomous Republic holds a great deal more power than the TAR). Out of
the one million inhabitants, Buryat Mongolians only make up around 30%,
the remaining 70% are Russians. The lingua franca is Russian. Buryat
Mongolians basically only speak their mother tongue at home.

The Tibetologist Nikolay Tsyrempilov gave me his book about the 13th
Dalai Lama and the famous Buryat Lama Ngawang Dorje that he had written
with the Tibetan scholar Jampa Samten and published in English and
Tibetan as a present. It includes the many letters that His Holiness the
13th Dalai Lama and Ngawang Dorje exchanged.

The original “Tibet Mongolia Treaty”

Ngawang Dorje, also known as Agvan Dorjiev, was a Buryat Mongolian, a
“Geshe Lharampa” Lama from Drepung monastery; he used to be a Minister
of the Kashag and acted as a diplomat under the 13th Dalai Lama. He was
entrusted to compile the first draft of the famous “Tibet Mongolia
Treaty” that was signed on December 29, 1912; he was one of the Tibetan
representatives who signed the treaty that declared the Tibetan and
Mongolian independence from the Qing government and broke off all
political relations with China.

The Mongolian writer, Daxi Dongribu, who lives in Japan, wrote in his
essay “The Tibetan-Mongolian Past”: “In this treaty, Tibet and Mongolia
proclaim mutual recognition, the preface stipulates: ‘Given that
Mongolia and Tibet have already broken away from the Manchurian dynasty,
are separated from China, and have become independent countries, and
given that both countries share the same religion, with the aim of
strengthening the two country’s historic mutual friendship…’ the
following articles explicitly specify friendship, mutual help, the
intimate friendship between two Buddhist countries, trade relations etc.
The document makes occasional use of the Tibetan word ‘Rangzen’ which
means ‘independence’.”

The 14th Dalai Lama says in Thomas Laird’s “The Story of Tibet:
Conversations with the Dalai Lama” that Ngawang Dorje “was in fact an
outstanding scholar and pious Buddhist monk, and he was always loyal to
the 13th Dalai Lama.”

Ngawang Dorje was persecuted by Stalin and died in 1938 at the age of 84.

Zhang Boshu’s recent book

The Chinese government always has hated Ngawang Dorje (whose Chinese
name is De Erzhi), labelling him as a “Russian spy” who “illegally
signed the ‘Tibet Mongolia Treaty’ declaring the ‘separation of Tibet
and Mongolia from China, splitting up the country and founding two
independent nations’”. The Chinese government has been vehemently
rejecting and vilifying Ngawang Dorje. Interestingly, the Chinese
political scientist and constitutional scholar Zhang Boshu who currently
resides in the US, in his most recent book “The Tibet Issue in China’s
Democratic Transition”, adopts a very similar language to the CCP,
calling Ngawang Dorje a “Russian spy who used Buddhism to gain the Dalai
Lama’s trust”, and quoted large parts of the biggest social scientific
project to revise Tibetan history, “The History of
Tibet–Turquoise Beads”, showing that he entertains exactly the same
viewpoint as the CCP.

The famous international Tibetologist and professor at Indiana
University, Elliot Sperling, cannot help but laugh about the CCP’s and
Zhang Boshu’s misrepresentations of Ngawang Dorje’s life story: “If
Ngawang Dorje had really been some kind of ‘special agent’, then he must
have been a special agent of the 13th Dalai Lama. It is true that he
implemented Russian policies, but he did so for the advantage of Tibet
and not as part of a Tsarist Russian conspiracy. Tibet was at the time
facing the invasion of the British Empire. Russian politics were
naturally directed at containing the British Empire; and when the Dalai
Lama was in Mongolian exile he also entered into a political dialogue
with Tsarist Russia.”

It is, however, strange that the Central Tibetan Administration’s
department in charge of communications with the Chinese world, regards a
nationalist scholar like Zhang Boshu as an important person “increasing
Chinese people’s truthful knowledge about the current Tibetan
question”.

August 2014

Originally published at http://highpeakspureearth.com/2015/was-the-diplomat-of-the-13th-dalai-lama-a-russian-spy-by-woeser/ and republished in TPR with permission.